Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (25 page)

This was a world fit for Robert. Coming off the win in their first outing, Robert, Kip, and their coach were excited about the fast start. Robert was good, albeit rough around the edges. He picked up on issues quickly and seemed more aware of current events than most kids. “He was very smart and good at bantering, just the sort of guy you see at Harvard,” O’Brien said. The coach also saw Robert relish the spotlight, as if he told himself, “Hey, I get eight minutes to really sound off here.” He especially liked going second on the team, a slot usually taken by a team’s strongest debater to cross-examine the opponent. It was an opportunity, said O’Brien, to “set the other person up and make them look foolish.” Robert embraced this chance “to ding the other guy.” Jim knew this to be true: “When he wants to be verbally abusive he is very verbally abusive.”

But O’Brien grew quickly discouraged with his star. Robert might get psyched for the actual “performance” of the debate, but practices were still a joke to him. He fooled around with Jim and paid little to no attention. He was lazy. In fact, instead of building on his early interest and refining his technique, Robert grew more restless and cavalier. Instead of an upward growth curve, the arc of Robert’s participation had that familiar backslide to it.

“He wasn’t prepared,” O’Brien said about the Robert who showed up at the later tournaments. The judges felt the same way. Time and again they noted Robert’s intelligence, but also criticized him for being “really rude.” Said another coach, who saw Robert at four debates, “He was always pushing the envelope with his remarks. Debate is argument and evidence, and Robert usually didn’t have any evidence.”

Robert won some, he lost some, and with every merit came a demerit. “The reason he did not become the best debater clearly that year is he didn’t do the work,” said O’Brien. “People who weren’t nearly as good as he was, with their work, and using evidence, were always going to beat Robert.” No one imposed any limits on him. He suffered no real consequences for being, as O’Brien said, “way too sarcastic.”

There did come one moment when O’Brien had enough of the Robert and Jim Show. Even though they both were taking fewer classes and had an inordinate amount of time on their hands, they were invari-ably late. Jim, not on the team, simply assumed his perch as a pest in the peanut gallery. “He was just disrupting everything,” said O’Brien. But instead of coming down hard on them, instead of insisting they quit their antics, instead of making pronouncements about accountability—“Hey guys, you’re way out of line here, you’re embarrassing our program, and if you get down off your high horses you’ll see you’re embarrassing yourselves, too”—the coach cut them slack. He challenged Jim to join the team, to partner with Robert at the final tournament on February 19 at Mount Saint Joseph Academy in Rutland. To up the ante, O’Brien bet Jim a dollar he’d lose.

Jim and Robert loved the idea—bring it on, they said. The debate was soon upon them and Robert and Jim took on all comers, to a fault. The team from Otter Valley High School argued that allowing Ebonics—the vernacular of some black youths—would help academics. Robert and Jim, assigned to argue that Ebonics was a lousy idea, seized the performance opportunity. Robert stood up and talked in Ebonics in his rebuttal. Jim rooted him on and tried the same when his turn came. The two used Ebonics the rest of the debate. Their

coach was partly amused but mostly horrified. “They are both good mimics,” he said, “and stayed in character way longer than I could. It was sort of like a
Saturday Night Live
skit.” But at the same time, the coach said, “You know, they were both skirting racism, too.”

No one was surprised when the Chelsea team lost hands down. But the drive back to Chelsea in O’Brien’s Honda Civic was hardly a bummer. Robert and Jim were jazzed up, delighted with themselves for having sabotaged the debate. Jim at one point opened the car door, stuck out his leg, and howled at the top of his lungs.

O’Brien wasn’t impressed, but the coach didn’t know what to do. The one thing he did realize was that his big idea had backfired badly—Robert and Jim had turned the debate into a travesty. But the foolish Ebonics riff wasn’t the end of it.

T
he state tournament was the climax of Vermont’s high school debate season, held inside the gold-domed Capitol building in Montpelier

every year in early March. O’Brien wasn’t planning to send anyone in 2000. The reason had nothing to do with the Ebonics disaster—the Chelsea squad was down to one member: Robert.

Other kids had come and gone. Robert had started the season paired with Kip Battey, but by the winter Kip was no longer at school. Far ahead on credits to graduate, Kip and Coltere Savidge were tasting academic life beyond Chelsea, boarding at the Mountain School. O’Brien then matched up Robert with classmate Anna Mulligan, who had returned to school after spending the fall semester away, also at the Mountain School. O’Brien actually liked what he had in Anna and Robert, even if it was clear to the coach the classmates weren’t the best of friends. Anna, attractive and graceful, had an “elegant style,” while Robert was more “in your face and brash.” The coach thought the good cop–bad cop tandem could work. But Anna’s interest in debate waned quickly. Like Kip, Robert, Coltere, and other junior classmates who had gotten way ahead on their credits, Anna was pursuing interests beyond school. She wasn’t interested in the state tournament on March 11.

Most other schools in the Vermont league were sending several two-person teams to compete at the all-day event. They’d be squaring off before a lineup of prominent judges, including state officials, attorney David Kelley, who’d waged an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1994, and some “celebrity” judges, most notably the star of O’Brien’s documentary, farmer Fred Tuttle. But Robert, without a partner, was left out in the cold.

This changed a few days before the tournament. O’Brien got a telephone call from the debate coach at Rutland Senior High School. Compared to Chelsea, Rutland was overflowing with talent; it was sending three teams. The Rutland coach also had a seventh debater without a partner, a freshman named Luke White. The Rutland coach wanted to find a partner so the fifteen-year-old boy might enjoy the experience of debating at the state tournament, even though a mixed pairing wouldn’t be in contention to win a trophy. The coach had initially suggested to Luke a debater from Otter Valley High School, but Luke vetoed the match. Luke White had another teenager in mind: What about Robert Tulloch from Chelsea? The two boys had met at a tournament earlier in the season and become friendly, exchanging e-mails. Luke, an intense, ambitious student, had found something charming about the easygoing Robert. Between rounds during the often cutthroat competition, when other kids warily sized one another up, Luke liked that Robert seemed “laid back, very cool.” Robert jumped at the offer. The two boys might not be able to win a school trophy, but Robert knew he’d still have the opportunity to show the league he was the best on his feet; he was still eligible to win Best Individual Speaker.

The state tournament captured Robert’s season in a nutshell—fast, flashy start followed by rapid, nasty decline.

Robert and Luke faced one of toughest teams in the league in the opening round—and won, thrilling themselves and O’Brien. But once they lost their second-round match to another strong team, Robert’s mood darkened. Luke, shrugging off the loss, sought to boost his partner’s spirits. During the midday lunch break, he spotted a news photographer in the hallway of the Capitol, and he badgered the photographer

to take a picture of him and his teammate. Robert, liking the attention, went along with the goof and the two boys played to the camera. They stood outside the governor’s office, a few feet from an oil portrait of Richard A. Snelling, Vermont’s governor from 1977 to 1985, and struck statesmen-like poses. The photograph in the next day’s
Rutland Herald
showed Robert looking earnestly at a debate notebook he held open in his hands, while Luke, standing at his side, pointed to something in the book. “It was so staged,” said Luke. “Robert was trying to look so attentive. We laughed about it afterwards. It was kind of cool we were in the paper.”

But there was nothing cool about their third and final round. Luke went first against the team from Mount Saint Joseph

Academy. He was unfamiliar with the affirmative argument he and Robert were using—the plan O’Brien had devised about classroom lighting—so it made sense that Luke open by reading the plan. “In Genesis, when God said, ‘Let there be light,’ was he creating the universe, or proposing a plan to significantly increase academic achievement?” he began.

The two novice teams were crowded into a small upstairs room in the Capitol. Posters and paintings of cows and livestock revealed that this was the legislature’s Agriculture Committee room. It had plush, ruby-red carpet and barely enough space for the long wooden table in the middle surrounded by upholstered chairs. The debaters sat tightly in a row on one side of the table piled with lawmakers’ papers.

“We, the affirmative, say, ‘Let there be light,’ ” Luke said.

Luke was on his feet, dressed in a dark blazer, a blue shirt, and a tie, his brown hair neatly combed to one side. Robert sat next to him. He wasn’t wearing a sports jacket or a tie, but he looked tidy, having buttoned his plaid shirt all the way to his neck. Down the table sat the team from Mount Saint Joseph—Matt Gregg and Johannes Gamba. Johannes, lanky and as tall as Robert, was from a small village in Bavaria, about an hour from Munich, Germany. He was a foreign exchange student staying with a family in Rutland.

A few feet away, across the table, sat the judge, the former guber-natorial candidate David Kelley. O’Brien sat behind the judge with two

friends, both journalists, who’d never seen a debate and had come along out of curiosity.

Luke worked his way through the Chelsea argument that better classroom lighting would boost academic achievement. He said, “Does anybody here feel more ‘alive’ in a fluorescent-lit room with no windows than in a bright, sunny room? Remember what Emerson said in
Nature:
‘Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.’ ” He finished with a flourish: “We must now watch the negative prove that gloominess is good for grades. But while you’re listening to our esteemed opposition make the case for dimness, remember what Goethe requested on his deathbed: ‘Light, more light!’ ”

Johannes Gamba sat listening to Luke with mounting dread. How could he answer the “weird speech” about installing skylights and windows to bring natural light into classrooms? The plan was out of left field and caught Johannes off guard. He and his partner had come armed with evidence and facts to attack more standard plans. Had their opponents tried to argue, for example, that school uniforms improved student performance, Johannes and Matt were ready to beat that plan into the ground. But this “Let there be light” plan was unusual.

For Johannes, the tournament was his final competition—and he’d had a blast being on the team. Indeed, his exchange year in the United States had been terrific. “I like America more than Germany, actually,” he told his new friends in Rutland. His high school back home in the tiny village of Penzing didn’t have any extracurricular activities, and Johannes had found the offerings at Mount Saint Joseph a dazzling smorgasbord. A non-athlete, a self-proclaimed computer geek, Johannes decided to join the debate team at his adopted high school. “I’ve always liked to debate about things in real life and I figured it would be even cooler to do it in a foreign language,” Johannes said.

When his turn came, Johannes stumbled, only able to offer some bland, generic counterarguments against the lighting plan—like flatly asserting it was just a bad idea that would fail. The others in the room, Chelsea’s O’Brien and his two journalist friends, could see that Luke and Robert had the upper hand.

Robert smelled blood. He stood to cross-examine Johannes. So far during the debate the other boys had been stiff and formal as they’d spoken. They’d all faced forward and looked at the judge rather than make eye contact with one another up and down the row. But right away Robert was different. He leaned toward Johannes and locked eyes with him. Robert rocked, his body language cocky.

John O’Brien shifted in his seat; something was up. O’Brien knew Robert had become increasingly soured by the day’s events. Pushed in the first round, Robert rose to the occasion and pulled out a surprise win against the team that would end up winning the tournament. That round’s judge even told O’Brien afterward that the debate had been “as good as any varsity debate.” After round one, Robert briefly led all debaters in speaker points. But then came the second-round loss, and with that Robert’s fantasy about winning the best speaker trophy was crushed. During the lunch break, O’Brien saw that Robert remained upset. Facing a team unable to offer much competition in round three, Robert was now spoiling for a fight.

He began by peppering Johannes with questions. His manner was heavy-handed and rough—the very opposite of the approach O’Brien would have coached when a team was clearly ahead. Robert and Luke could have tap-danced their way to a win. But Robert was no longer interested in the here and now, his manner turbulent and provocative as he opened his cross-examination with his trademark sarcasm.

Johannes couldn’t keep pace with the grilling—“I didn’t know the answer”—in large part because he wasn’t able to follow Robert’s rapid-fire English. When Johannes hesitated, Robert pounced.

“You’re just a
German.
How can you know?” Robert’s voice ricocheted around the room. “You’re just a
German
. . . ”

Instantly everyone knew the comment was out of bounds—everyone except, of course, Robert. Luke looked up, maybe even gasped. He preferred to think Robert hadn’t intended any malice, but that didn’t mat-ter. Luke understood how the remark sounded. He leaned toward Robert and whispered to his teammate, “You’ve got to apologize.” Even if Luke didn’t think Robert’s comment was a slur, Luke knew it would